A Crossbow String
by Briony8869
Summary: A combination of the Hannibal books, TV show, and films. Will Graham is put on the case of rescuing Clarice Starling, who has been drugged and kidnapped by Hannibal Lecter. But Clarice's feelings for Hannibal are complicated. And Will himself is still struggling with his feelings and regrets about his relationship with Hannibal. A Hannigram fic with some Hannibal/Clarice.
1. Chapter 1

Dr. Hannibal Lecter struggled to keep his eyes focused, dragging his pummeled, broken body forward through the streets of Florence. Jack Crawford had really done a number on him this time, he had to walk carefully so as not to further injure at least one broken and several cracked ribs, and that was difficult considering his right leg was impaled and practically useless. One arm hung limply from a dislocated shoulder. The fuzziness at the edge of his vision and his difficulty concentrating for more than a few minutes on any one thing indicated a moderate to severe concussion. Stunning and ancient stone architecture lined his path as he moved forward, limping down curved and hard to predict side streets, avoiding the more spacious piazzas. Once he reached an area with fast food restaurants with plastic signs and hole in the wall beauty shops he allowed himself to slow down. A beaten, bloodied man would attract less attention in a less upscale side of town, and in areas where most people have some kind of criminal history there's a smaller likelihood of someone reporting you.

"Hello Doctor."

It spoke to Hannibal's current weakened state that he hadn't managed to smell Will Graham's approach over the familiar scent of his own, drying blood. He shut his eyes, taking a deep breath.

"Will."

"I can't say you're looking well, Doctor Lecter."

"I regret that very much Will. I would much rather have seen you at my best."

The two men stared at each other, a few feet apart, face-to-face. It was almost as though they were back in Hannibal's office. In this case, even with Hannibal covered in blood and Will looking as though he had just walked three hundred miles along a Eurail track, their eyes met with the same sharp intensity as ever.

"The last time you saw me I looked quite a bit worse, you might remember." Will said, absently touching the deep scar on his stomach.

"I remember our last meeting very clearly Will." Hannibal said. "Now, if you'll forgive me, I must sit down." He swayed a bit on his feet, the pain of his beating catching up with him.

"Are you all right?" Will asked quickly, with concern. He stepped forward as though to grab Hannibal's arm before stopping himself.

"I have a broken rib which is threatening to puncture my lung. I would prefer that it didn't; I'm sure you understand." Hannibal slowly lowered himself to the curb, legs trembling as he did so. He eyed the rooftops where Will's glance had betrayed the presence of snipers, but he couldn't focus well enough to figure out which window they were using. "As such, I would prefer it very much to not have to place my hands on my head during the arrest."

Will sighed, and then nodded. He had imagined this going differently. In complete honesty he had imagined arresting/murdering Hannibal Lecter in about every possible fashion. Several of them involved hugging.

"I'm… sorry." Will couldn't believe the words were coming out of his mouth, even if they were true.

"This is not the way this should end, Will." Hannibal said, his eyes were shut, face facing towards the heavens. "We deserve better."

Will could only imagine what Hannibal would think was better. Probably Will personally crucifying him on a cross of Elk Antlers, his organs twisted artistically around each prong. Hannibal probably wouldn't even mind being murdered, he'd just nod in appreciation of the artistry while the life slowly dripped from his body.

"I told you I would never deny you your life." Will said.

Hannibal opened his eyes and met Will's gaze. "More's the pity."

And with that the entire power of the Italian Polizia de Stato and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation was unleashed, surrounding Hannibal and Will in a halo of pointed weaponry. Several helicopters hovered overhead and every single townsperson on the street ducked into hiding while craning their necks to figure out what was going on.

Hannibal met Will's gaze for one final second, and then with a slow exhale of breath disappeared into his mind palace. Will felt abandoned as the police force took the injured and bloody man into custody, and a little sick. As much as he wanted Hannibal Lecter out of his head, he couldn't help but agree. After all they had been through, they deserved better.

* * *

Will's first lucid thought, waking up in the hospital after the horrifying discovery of Francis Dolarhyde in his front yard, was that consulting Dr. Hannibal Lecter on the Red Dragon case had been a mistake.

He had thought he could do it. It had been years since Hannibal Lecter had thoroughly fucked him up. He had a wife and family now. He hadn't had a murderous thought or impulse since the good doctor had been institutionalized. But after meeting Hannibal in his cold, undignified cell, after sprinting like a frightened child out of the mental hospital and having nightmares for weeks, he realized how overconfident and rash that decision had been.

Alana Bloom sat by his bed, wearing some ridiculous and expensive outfit that made her look like she came from the land of Oz. She had gone full Verger now. He supposed that her love for her partner must be strong to overcome having to live with that disgusting excuse for a human being, Mason Verger.

"Hello Will." Alana said, and while her voice had never regained the warmth she had had before Hannibal threw her out a window, she did not sound unfriendly.

"Is… Molly here?" Will asked her.

"No. You probably don't remember, as you fled and abandoned your wife and child to Francis Dolarhyde, but Molly ended up shooting him." Alana said, coldly.

"I…oh." Will groaned and laid his head back. "Good for Molly."

"She doesn't want to see you."

"Got that, Alana. Thanks."

"I understand that, given the circumstances, this might not be the most therapeutic thing for you to hear, but I told you not to get involved with this case."

"You did, that is true, thanks for that as well, Alana. Is Jack here? Jesus."

"Fuck Jack." Alana picked up an envelope from the table besides Will's hospital bed. "You have a letter."

"From Molly?" Will perked up until he saw the handwriting on the envelope, as close to perfect calligraphy as you could draw using a hospital issued crayon. "Oh." Will took the letter like someone would pick up an eviction notice. "Does he write you letters?"

"He only writes letters to people he likes."

"I guess you're right. Sorry."

"I take some pride in not being the sort of person Hannibal Lecter likes, Will, even though it makes me feel profoundly unsafe most of the time."

Will was reading Hannibal's letter, and had stopped paying attention to Dr. Bloom. It closed with the very polite statement: "I think of you often. Your old friend, Hannibal Lecter."

Tears, embarrassingly began to pool in the corner's of Will's eyes. Yet again, he found himself with the grand total of exactly one friend. Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the manipulative ex who could find a way to isolate you even after he was behind bars. Will wanted to laugh.

* * *

Will was in line at a liquor store/Lebanese restaurant down the road from his house when he saw on the news that Dr. Hannibal Lecter had escaped. Black bars censored the grainy footage of Hannibal's two prison guards' brutalized corpses, propped up with their flayed skin looking almost like angel wings. Will found himself frustrated at the censor. He wanted to see the full piece of art. Everyone interviewed on TV was sick, panicked, shell shocked. News reporters struggled to explain Dr. Lecter's escape in a way that wouldn't traumatize too many youngsters watching at home. Will pieced together from descriptions that Hannibal had torn off a guard's face and worn it as a mask. The scene was grisly.

Reporters kept badgering a young woman, apparently the last FBI agent to speak to him. "AGENT STARLING" They all shouted, "CLARICE WHAT DID HE SAY!?" Starling's expressionless face held up better than Will would have expected from an agent in her early twenties. She seemed like a tough nut to crack.

"Friggin' scary, huh?" The teenager working at the counter observed, snapping Will's attention off the screen. "I can't believe Hannibal the Cannibal's back on the streets."

"Hm." Will put his bottle of cheap bourbon down on the counter. "Can I just go ahead and order a dinner for two?" He asked, reaching for his wallet.

But Will's hunch was wrong, Hannibal didn't show up in house that evening. Will ate his double order of pita chips and hummus alone and told himself that he was not disappointed. What did he expect, for Hannibal to show up and ask for one of his dish towel's to wipe another man's blood off of his face? No, he was not so screwed up as to be disappointed.

Hannibal turned up at Will's house about three weeks later. The length of time it takes for the FBI folks sent to guard Will's house to be rotated through the really good staff and roll around to the teenage FBI trainees who had a tendency to get bored and watch their cell phones when they were meant to be on patrol. That was when Will came home from his work as an auto-mechanic to the smell of garlic and spices, and the sight of a well muscled man in a well tailored suit moving around his kitchen like a dancer.

"Tell me you aren't cooking one of my dogs." Will said.

Hannibal gave him a disappointed look. Will nodded and sat down and his tiny kitchen table.

"You've moved down in the world since we last met Will. This isn't the address I shared with the Dragon. And you have hardly any counter space at all."

"I don't cook much for myself." Will said. "And I think you can tell me why I'm not sharing my life with anyone right now."

"Tsk tsk tsk… Will. I'm sure you could have attracted another special someone in the years since we've spoken."

"Yes, and I'm pretty sure if I had you would be preparing them for dinner right now, not… what the hell _are_ you making?"

"One of my guards. I'm going to have to season him up a bit, he was a disgusting person generally and he died under quite a bit of stress. I'll have to counter the acidity. Your spice cabinet is embarrassing Will." He gestured to Will's "spice cabinet" which was made up of salt, pepper, oregano which had expired about 4 years ago, waxy red pepper flakes, and garlic powder which had solidified into a brick. Hannibal handed will a large glass of red wine which was worth more than what Will made in a month these days. He took a resigned sip.

"Did the FBI ask you to consult on the Buffalo Bill case?" Hannibal asked.

"They did. I said no."

Hannibal turned around with two plates of what looked like a fine pasta with a deep red meat sauce. He'd even managed to garnish it with the dried oregano Will had forgotten was even in his pantry.

"Bon appetit." Hannibal gave his little smile and Will found himself smiling back.

"Did you make the pasta yourself?"

"You had flour and eggs Will, I did what I could. Why did you not lend your powers of deductive reasoning to the case of Buffalo Bill? You used to tell me you were morally obligated to stop these killers."

"I'm a little less sure about my moral obligations these days, Hannibal." Will said calmly, taking a large bite of pasta. It was delicious.

"Perhaps your refusal was why they ended up consulting with me." Hannibal said.

"Maybe. You should thank me then, you clearly got what you wanted out of it."

Again, Hannibal smiled. He swirled his glass of wine around expertly, inhaling with a look of peaceful delight.

"I made a charming new acquaintance Will. Her name is Clarice Starling. You would like her very much I think."

"I saw her on the news. Is she Jack's new protégée?"

"Jack is using her like he uses every talented person he meets. To cover up for his own lack of imagination and intellect."

"Sounds like she made a good impression."

"She is very intelligent and capable. She's wasted on the FBI, they'll never see her potential. Much like they never saw yours, Will."

Will nodded noncommittally and continued eating in silence. It was very probably his last supper, and he was surprised at how little he cared. He felt comfortable with Hannibal, in a way he hadn't felt in years. For a moment he pondered what kind of dish Hannibal would turn him into, and all he felt was anticipation at being made into something delicious. It would make a nice change from his current miserable life.

"I'm here to say goodbye, Will." Hannibal pronounced, putting down his fork.

"Are you?" Will asked, presuming the statement to be a precursor to his murder. He wasn't even sweating, he was enjoying just looking at Hannibal without protective glass between them, like the old days.

"I have no intention of being recaptured, and that will involve my complete disappearance."

"And I know too much and cannot be allowed to live, I understand." Will said scratching the back of his neck.

Hannibal's jaw dropped.

"You don't know anything Will, why would I kill you?"

"I know you too well. We have too much history. I'm unpredictable and you know I can surprise you. You've got to kill me."

Hannibal stood up and approached Will's chair, kneeling beside it. His eyes were tender and dark and cold. For the first time Will trembled. Hannibal put his hand to the side of Will's face and Will found himself nuzzling into it, like one of his dogs. Leaning in, Hannibal whispered in his ear,

"I will keep in touch."

He then took Will's head in both hands and slammed it into the wall. Will went limp. Carrying him tenderly, like a parent putting their child to bed after they fell asleep in the car, Hannibal lay him down on the couch. He stood for a moment, adjusting his tie and collar, staring at his prone friend. He stroked the side of Will's face, kissed his cheek, and left him. When Will woke up the next morning his dishes were done and there was a fresh bouquet of wildflowers artfully displayed on his kitchen table. He never reported the incident to the FBI.

* * *

Most of Will's life was simple. He had given up being a consultant for the FBI, and had thus lost the main source of stress and the only source of meaning in his life. He didn't date. He fished quite a bit, in fact, his hours fishing were the only truly peaceful and happy moments in his life. He worked as a mechanic at a local garage, where most of his coworkers didn't know that he was that guy with the weird relationship with Hannibal the Cannibal, registered trademark. He didn't socialize much. He was very quiet and came across as odd with the few neighbors with whom he did speak. He owned a large number of weapons.

Most of the time the FBI left him alone. The man who caught Hannibal Lecter for the first and only time was not asked to try to catch him again. This came as a relief to Will, although he was certain that they were not leaving him alone out of consideration for his mental state. They probably just thought he couldn't do his magical deductions anymore.

He rarely, if ever saw Alana. So when she turned up at his doorstep with no makeup, expensive black and white clothes askew, and a look of genuine panic in her eyes, it came as a bit of a shock.

"How did you get here?" Will asked the woman on his doorstep. He lived in the middle of nowhere, Florida. It was a terrible place, very hard to find.

"Margot's motorcycle." Alanna said.

"Oh. Is she out waiting on the yacht somewhere?"

"Will," Alanna closed her eyes and swallowed shakily. "May I come in?"

Will stepped out of the way to allow Alanna into his home. She sat down heavily in one of the cheap folding chairs that he used around his dining table, and took a deep, uneven breath. "Something has happened. Mason's dead." She said in a flat, dull voice.

"Oh!" Will crossed his arms and looked at his guest, trying to feign concern. "Am I… sad? about that?"

"The circumstances are… well, it's all bizarre."

"Did Margot kill him?" Will asked, realizing as he said it that he was being too blunt. He had to get back into the dance of non self-incrimination that used to come so fluently to he and Hannibal.

"As you are probably aware, Mason had invested a considerable amount of money in finding Hannibal Lecter."

"He seemed like a vengeful sort of guy. I'm surprised he hasn't had me brutalized yet, Hannibal had him feed his face to MY dogs."

"Mason Verger was a horrible person, just, just the most cartoonishly awful…" Alana took a deep breath to compose herself. "I was willing to help him find Hannibal. I wasn't going to let him get you."

"You… worked with Mason?" Will could feel the judgment coming through in his tone and tried to stop it.

"We _got_ him Will. For a minute."

"A minute. And now Mason's dead, and Hannibal's out, And you…"

"I'm not in a great place, but I had to tell you, Hannibal didn't escape alone. We weren't stupid, we tranquilized him with a dartgun in a parking lot and we weren't going to let him even wake up, but he was rescued."

"I didn't…"

"No, not you, Clarice Starling. She came out of nowhere with guns blazing and she fucking SAVED HANNIBAL Will."

Will sat down heavily in his thrift store recliner. So Hannibal had been rescued by his "charming new acquaintance."

"Wasn't she just involved in some big FBI lawsuit?" Will asked, recalling something he had seen on the news a few months ago.

"Yes, they accused her of working with Hannibal Lecter. I thought it was bunk until she Ramboed us."

"Somehow Hannibal's behind all of it, pulling the strings." Will said. "He's got her under his thumb."

"Well, it's a place you're familiar with, Will."

Will bit his cheek, but didn't respond to that.

"You… want me to find him?" he asked, dubiously.

"Look at it this way." Alana said, soothingly. "You aren't finding Hannibal Lecter, you are rescuing Clarice Starling."

"And if I find him…"

"Stop him. And get her out of there. I spoke with her once, on the Buffalo Bill case. I tried to prepare her for dealing with Dr. Lecter. Apparently she did all right."

"Where are you off to?"

"I'm not telling anyone that right now. God knows what good it will do me." Alana shrugged. "He doesn't hate Margot as much as he hates me. That'll buy us some time."

"Good luck, Alana." Will took her hands as he said it, and he meant her nothing but good.

* * *

"Hey, can we pull over at Chick-Fil-A?" a truly deep southern accent drawled at Hannibal Lecter from the passenger's seat of his recently stolen Fiat.

He wasn't sure how to respond. Clarice had been under a fairly heavy drug cocktail for the past several weeks, but the past few days he had been slowly weaning her off of it. Maybe this desire for greasy food was a side effect of that.

"No." He replied flatly.

Clarice looked at him out of the corner of her eye, and he saw, with a feeling of cold dread, that she was being serious.

"I'm hungry though."

"Then we'll get something to eat."

"I want waffle fries."

Hannibal stared straight ahead, unsure of what to do here. The last meal that he and Clarice had shared had been the extremely fresh brain of Clarice's former colleague Paul Krendler, who had also been seated at the dinner table with them, under a similar mix of drugs as Clarice. She had handled the entire situation with her usual easy charm and quick wit. Frankly, the evening had been delightful. Clarice had looked like a million dollars in the dress Hannibal had procured for her (an Alexander McQueen, worth upwards of $450,000, just for full disclosure) and afterwards they had had a rewarding chat and retired to their separate rooms. Hannibal had decided not to give her her drug cocktail, just to see how she would react. So far she seemed a bit foggy but mostly fine. Apart from this disgusting craving.

"Hannibal, did you hear me? I want waffle fries." Clarice repeated, infuriatingly.

"I don't eat that kind of food."

"Are you…" Clarice sat up a little straighter in her seat. "Are you judging me? For fast food? You… fucking… you eat _people_."

"I am not judging you, I simply refuse to eat any meal that I do not consider to be worthwhile. You certainly seemed to enjoy Paul Krendler as an ingredient."

Clarice pursed her lips.

"Well I think waffle fries are worthwhile."

"I disagree."

Clarice was about to continue the discussion, but her face fell. "Oh shit, what day is it?"

"The 14th."

"No what day of the week?"

"It's Sunday."

"Never mind, they're closed."

Hannibal raised an eyebrow.

"I forgot, Chik Fil A honors their God by abstaining from profits one day a week. A worthless gesture."

"I'm gonna pull the emergency brake if you don't shut up."

Hannibal smiled very slightly and looked at his companion out of the corner of his eye. Even as she looked today, slumped in a car wearing jeans and a tank top, Clarice Starling was reminiscent of a Greco-roman statue. Her skin was pale and clear, and her slight under bite gave her an expression of stubborn determination. He had fantasized about killing her a million different ways, but again and again found that he didn't want to. Even now, when she was actively goading him, there was no urge to snap her neck, no desire to watch the beauty bleed out and leave her skin even paler. He would rather have her to bicker with.

Clarice put her feet, clad in new leather pumps he had procured for her, up on the dashboard of the car. She slunk into her seat like a cranky toddler on a car trip.

Later, that night, in a hotel room in Williamsburg VA, Hannibal sat in a chair in his corner of the room with a book, while Clarice stretched out on her queen size bed, dozing. His eyes ran down her back, which still rippled with FBI muscles on her small frame. He reached into his inner coat pocket for a syringe, containing at this point an extremely diluted drug cocktail, similar to the ones he gave Will Graham to keep him disoriented in their early therapy sessions.

"I'm not going to run away, you know." Clarice muttered, rolling over. Her tank top had gotten pulled down a bit too much as she moved around on the bed, and Hannibal had to focus to keep his eyes on her face. "I won't turn you in." She promised.

"I am afraid that is exactly what someone that was trying to run away and turn me in would say." Hannibal admitted, keeping the syringe in his coat pocket.

"I like you, Hannibal. I always have. You're a real gentleman."

"There are many who would argue otherwise."

"Well, you have killed a lot of people."

Hannibal remained silent. He watched Clarice with interest. At this point, with no further injections, she should be entirely in control of her own actions. There was a very strong possibility she was going to snap out of this blissful dreamy state and attempt to apprehend him. Clarice stretched out, toes curling, arms lifted above her head in a catlike, relaxed stretch.

"And it's not exactly gentlemanly to keep drugging a woman without her knowledge or consent." Clarice said, raising an eyebrow.

Hannibal blinked, surprised. "I apologize." He said softly. "Sincerely. If I had been certain that you would remain in my company without attempting to arrest me I would not have..."

"Am I still under something?"

"Do you feel as though you are?"

"Yes or no, Hannibal."

"…no."

"Hmm…" Clarice sat up and stared directly into Hannibal's face. She looked beautiful. For a moment Hannibal could see the little girl he imagined, running away from her aunt and uncle's house carrying a baby lamb to protect it. What a magnificent creature she was.

"You know," Clarice said, with a little laugh, "the first time I saw you I thought you looked like an otter."

"A what?"

"An otter. Do they have those, wherever the hell you're from?"

"Lithuania. Yes we have otters."

"I thought you looked like a weird otter."

Hannibal pursed his lips. "I'm not sure how to respond to that." He said.

"You don't have to. I just wanted you to know that I think you're a lot sexier now."

"Sexier… than an otter."

"MUCH."

Hannibal tapped his fingers together with concern.

"I spent weeks having conversations with you while you were under the influence of a variety of drugs, and this is the first clear-headed conversation topic you have decided upon?"

"I don't think you understand." Clarice oozed a little bit closer to Hannibal, smiling wickedly and leaning her head to the side, allowing her long hair to sweep down her shoulders. "I'm saying that I think you're cute."

She had been living with Hannibal for weeks, and yet she still smelled like Dial soap and hard work. She looked like truth and forgiveness. Her eyes were deep, dark, beautiful sin.

Hannibal leaned forward the tiny bit further that he needed to touch her face. She leaned in, eyes closed, waiting.

"You're beautiful, Clarice. May I kiss you?"

"Oh hell yes." Clarice mumbled, and then kissed him deeply. Hannibal kissed back, pulling her small waist and hips firmly into his.

For a moment, he thought of Will Graham and a house that he had made ready for them, so long ago. There was a pang of regret, long forgotten, for what might have been. But soon that thought was lost in a wave of kisses and sighs and soft skin and a thick southern accent moaning his name.


	2. Chapter 2

Consulting for the FBI had been one of the most stressful times in Will Graham's life. Nightmares kept him from sleeping more than about 4 hours a night. Each grisly murder scene he encountered sent him hurtling down another sick corridor of humanity, and it came close to overwhelming him. But at the same time, his years at the FBI had been the first time in his life he had successfully worked with a team. Beverly Katz had used to invite him out for drinks after work, and Alana had called him almost every day, just to check in. While Will struggled to swim against the tide of darkness in the world, he had a support group to get him through it. Then of course he found out that his therapist was actually the serial killer he had been hired to catch, which was pretty cataclysmic for his well-being.

All of this came flooding back to Will as he returned to the FBI headquarters where he used to work. It was easy to imagine everything back as it was. All of the new faces that he didn't recognize in the halls faded away. Alana was there, good old Alana, back when she was kind of frumpy and feminist and smiled a lot and drank beer. Beverly Katz stood next to him in a lab coat, cracking terribly insensitive jokes. Jack Crawford's office was full of his family photos and books and forgotten half empty coffee cups. He was Will Graham, FBI consultant and teacher. He was doing ok.

With a lurch he jumped back to reality. He was Will Graham, a bizarre, friendless car mechanic who lived in Florida and didn't help anyone, a Will Graham with a guest pass to his old workplace and subtle, under the table permission to look at Clarice Starling's office.

"Will?" A familiar man's voice called out. "No way… Will Graham?!" Jimmy Price was walking down the hallway, dressed in a suit like a real FBI agent. He had a few more lines on his face and crow's feet that crinkled around his eyes as he smiled, but it was still Jimmy. "Well hot dog!"

"You're still here?" Will asked.

"Are you kidding? Me and Brian are the only forensics fucked up enough to stick around!" Jimmy gave Will a quick hug and started walking down the hall with him. "You know the last doctor they sent in here quit after three days? He said it was too emotionally taxing! The only stiff he saw was a STABBING victim Will. A little gore, that's it. I saw a guys brain turned into a beehive, and I still eat honey grahams."

Will smiled in response, half amused, half weirded out.

"So what are you doing back?" Jimmy asked, fiddling with a pair of rubber gloves he had pulled out of his pocket. "I figured when you didn't show up for Jack's funeral I was never going to see you again."

"Oh… yes." A sick cold feeling spread through Will, starting from his gut. He had heard of Jack's heart attack from an email the FBI sent to his former colleagues. He had deleted it without looking at the date of the funeral. It was too horrible to think about. "How was it?"

"Just awful. Obviously his wife was already gone, he had no kids, and he fucked up literally everything he touched his last 10 years at the bureau. I mean, everybody tried to be nice, but he let Hannibal Lecter escape twice, Will, and kidnap another newbie." Jimmy shook his head. "You can't bounce back from that."

"That's… That's actually why I'm here." Will pushed his grief to the side for a moment. "Tell me what you know about Clarice Starling."

* * *

Somehow, by some miracle, Starling's "Catch Hannibal Cave" had remained unmolested by the FBI. As soon was Will walked in he realized that the big-wigs must have had no idea what the hell she was doing in there, or they would have torn it up for clues. The room looked like a half completed sitcom set of Hannibal Lecter's house, scattered with incongruous notebooks and forensic equipment. One corner was his psychiatrist office, his copper Elk statue looming ominously from a pile of books. Another corner was full of the kind of extremely nice equipment that had previously been hanging in Hannibal's kitchen. The kind of cookware that costs $1,500 a pan and makes all of one's murder victims crispy and succulent.

In the few months before Clarice's public shaming and dismissal from the FBI, she had been left almost entirely to her own devices. From the looks of it she had taken good advantage of the freedom.

"Dang." Jimmy said, looking at the expensive and tasteful clutter. "Most folks say she found him, or he found her, and they ran off together." Jimmy said, hands in his pockets.

"So, pretty much what they said about me?" Will noted.

"I wasn't going to say anything but… yup."

Will took a deep breath and looked at the room again, trying to focus on the incongruous elements. The scattered notebooks with small, clear handwriting. The half finished cups of tea in mugs that said things like "LuRay Caverns 2007" and "You're 30? You gotta be KITTEN me!"

"She seems very… earnest." Will said, imagining the quick hands conscientiously writing down the labels of every wine bottle in Hannibal Lecter's cellar. Next to some of the extremely high prices she had drawn exclamation points.

"I never really got a read on her." Jimmy said. "Very pretty, Brian actually asked her out to coffee once, she turned him down so nicely he didn't realize he was rejected for like a week."

"Southern belle?"

"Southern something. In my opinion she was a backcountry girl who copied the UVA debutantes."

"I don't think I've ever met a debutante."

"They're awful, that's how you could tell she wasn't really one, she was too nice."

Will had come to this room to try to get a feel for Clarice Starling's personality. Sometimes Will's hyper-empathy party trick would kick in when he immersed himself in somebody else's space, never quite to the same degree as when he recreated a violent crime, but well enough to learn a bit about someone. The problem was, this space was focused almost entirely around Hannibal Lecter. Instead of gaining insight to Starling, the memories being jogged were deeply personal. He shivered when he saw a familiar wine glass, almost definitely one that had touched his lips multiple times. On the table next to the glass was a rolodex of recipes (C'mon Hannibal, what decade is it…) and a poster board, the type that elementary school teachers stock up on. In a tidy hand drawn diagram Will saw the recipe cards, many of them well loved with smears of oil and flour and blood and sauce, pinned next to, what, business cards? Pinned next to, dear lord, _missing persons reports._

Will was more familiar with Hannibal's particular brutality than most, but seeing it all lined up, like a middle school book report, chilled him. This girl was good.

"Would you mind, uh, clearing out for a minute?"

"Oh!" Jimmy looked bemused, "You're gonna do the…" he rolled his eyes back in his head, waving his hands around like a crazy person, "thing?"

"I'm going to do the thing, yes."

"K. See you later." Jimmy exited the space.

Will took a deep breath and tried to focus on all of Clarice's influence in the room. He felt jumbled and unfocused, and it was hard to get his empathy to settle on one object. If worse came to worse he could do regular old detective work and dig through her stuff taking notes like a normal person. He glanced at her notebooks, but they didn't do much for him. He looked over at some of her piles of evidence from Hannibal's apartment and froze. In a plastic zipped up bag in the corner will saw a blanket with a familiar pattern, covered in dark brown stains. A pink post-it note on the plastic protective sheet read "Horse blood. ?!"

Before Will could stop it he closed his eyes. He felt his body shudder, and the world sank into darkness. He felt a wave of vertigo. Reality melted away, replaced by a vivid reflection of an incident that happened years ago. He was back in Hannibal's living room, clutching a horse-blood stained blanket around his shoulders. It was expensively soft. He was shaking, full of adrenaline. Very recently he had almost killed a man in cold blood, and he could still smell the very distinctive scent of horse entrails. He gagged, remembering the liquid way the intestines had spilled out of the carcass as Clark Ingram ripped himself out of his fleshy prison.

He hadn't killed Clark Ingram, but there had been a scuffle to capture him. Will had landed a few punches before Hannibal caught Clark in a headlock, and both of them had left the scene bloody and sweaty and disgusting. Hannibal had offered to take Will to his house for a drink, and Will, very aware of the loaded gun in his jacket pocket, had nodded yes.

Hannibal slid through the darkness of his living room carrying two clinking glasses of whiskey with ice. A fire crackled, filling the room with the comforting scent of wood smoke and an orange half-light. Hannibal's striking face looked even more unusual in half-shadow as he stood over Will and smiled.

"Feeling better?" Hannibal asked, lowering himself smoothly into the seat next to Will and handing him his whiskey.

"I don't think so." Will said, taking a sip. The drink burned all the way down to his stomach, giving off a false sensation of warmth. Hannibal was very close to him now. He had a sort of proprietary air with him that Will didn't necessarily like. It was as though if he had an eyelash on his cheek Hannibal would lick his thumb and wipe it off for him in a motherly, humiliating way.

Hannibal didn't say anything, he just took a sip of his own drink and settled back into the couch, running his eyes up and down his guest's small frame. Will pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders, and, while he would have told anyone that would stop long enough to listen that Hannibal Lecter was a murderer and a monster who would die by his own hand, nonetheless, he leaned back and _snuggled his head into Hannibal's shoulder._

It was the first time something like this had happened between the two of them, so Will was surprised when Hannibal's only response was to calmly stroke the back of his neck as though this was all no big thing.

Despite himself, Will felt the tension melt out of him. He shut his eyes, and was overcome with a feeling of relaxation and well-being that he hadn't felt since before his time in prison. The closest he'd felt to it was when he had been imagining Hannibal's grisly murder.

"Did you drug me or something?" Will muttered, snuggling closer into Hannibals warmth.

"No. I imagine you must be exhausted, you've been through quite a lot."

"You've put me through quite a lot, you mean."

Hannibal guided Will's face towards his, stroking his cheek.

"You're all right, Will." Hannibal said. "You should forgive yourself."

"Forgive _myself_?" Will laughed bitterly. "I haven't done anything wrong."

Hannibal tilted his head slightly, face emotionless. He kissed Will then, on the mouth, slowly and deeply. Will leaned into it with a little subconscious moan. When Hannibal pulled back he looked up at him with glassy, needy eyes.

"Have you done anything wrong now?" Hannibal whispered, brushing some of Will's newly cut and styled hair out of his eyes.

Will didn't allow himself to think about that, he just kissed Hannibal again, more violently. Hannibal was strong, surprisingly strong, and pulled Will into him with force.

And Will was in the present again, staring at a gross blanket, standing in FBI headquarters, feeling shaky and sick to his stomach. Trembling slightly, he rushed back out of the office into the hallway, where he met a nonchalant Jimmy munching on a chocolate bar.

"Ooh, did you get one your vibes? Do you know where he is?"

Will flushed and muttered something noncommittal, escaping down the hallway. If Clarice Starling had a knack for this business, and by all evidence she certainly did, there was a very strong chance that she was going to know all about Will's relationship with Hannibal Lecter. And that relationship was not something Will was comfortable with, yet.

* * *

Clarice Starling stumbled, slightly tipsily, onto the antique four-post bed in her and Hannibal's new Havana hideout. The house was the sort of thing that interior decorators tack onto the walls of their cubicles: flaking bright blue paint over historic plaster walls, European neo-classical architecture heavily spiced up with the colors and textures of native cubanos. Clarice didn't notice her heavenly surroundings, she was too busy trying to pull a $3,000 high heel off of her tired, aching foot.

Hannibal was still out. He had heard rumors of some really fancy liquor or cigars or something and, after gaining Clarice's permission, had left with a cohort of disgustingly wealthy young futbol players in search for their object. Clarice was tired and drunk and had danced all motherfucking night, to paraphrase the popular showtune, and was now ready for some sleep.

She stretched out on the bed, curling her recently freed toes and taking in the muggy breezes from her window.

There was a sound.

Clarice sat up in the dark room, muscles tense. If she was at home, in her apartment, she would have reached for the gun she kept in her bedside table. The 1750s catfoot end table three inches to her left just held her wallet and her completely dead disposable cell phone.

She had almost decided that she had imagined the noise when it happened again, a muffled sound of a man's voice, indistinct but apparent, coming from the door at the foot of the stairs.

She had been too tired to take off her dress, so now Clarice found that her tight ballgown to be a hindrance to movement. She slipped it off as quick as she could and pulled on a tank top and pair of sweats from her dresser. If she was going to fight somebody damned if she was going to do it in her undies. She kept her feet bare, trying to make as little sound as possible, and slipped out the window of the second floor bedroom and down the fire escape. The kitchen had a very small window that was a tight squeeze even for somebody as small as Clarice to fit through, but she gymnasticked her way in there and grabbed a medium sized cooking knife. With a weapon her breath grew steady, her movements more confident. She paused, waiting for the intruder to make a sound.

There it was, louder this time, more like a groan. It was coming from a vent near the floor in the kitchens. For the first time Clarice remembered that this historic house had a basement and rooms for servants to stay.

Slowly, carefully, Clarice opened the door to the basement. It would be impossible to descend those water damaged wooden stairs without any creaking noises, her intruder would know where she was and that would ruin her very tentative advantage. That said, he couldn't come up without her knowing about it either. She stood perfectly still at the head of the stairs, framed by the little bit of moonlight still shining through the kitchen windows. There was no movement. She heard the sound again, much more clearly this time, and lowered the knife to her side.

"Who's down there?" She called out.

"MMMMFH! MMMMGH! MMMMMMMMMFGGHHH!" The response was in desperate guttural mutters. Clarice bit the inside of her cheek and descended the creaking stairs without fear.

A man was tied in the corner of the basement, head restrained with straps, arms wrapped around his back in an uncomfortable position and held there with black tape, legs strapped to large wooden planks to restrict movement. He had clearly undergone a great deal of plastic surgery, but there wasn't much one could do for a burn victim that wholly consumed by flame. It took her a few moments to recognize the emaciated man.

"Dr… Chilton?"

"MMMMMGH! GMAMMMRMMMMGH!" Tears streamed down his face, and Dr. Frederick Chilton tried to shake himself free from his ties.

Clarice sat down at the foot of the stairs.

"That son of a bitch." She muttered, making no move to help him. She saw the hope in Chilton's eyes fade as realization dawned. This was not an FBI rescue. Clarice Starling was not a good guy anymore.

Frederick Chilton, not for the first time in his life, regretted not choosing another line of work.

The moment Hannibal Lecter had returned home, very expensive cigars in hand, he was accosted by an irate tiny Louisanian holding a kitchen knife. She had dragged him down into the cellar and asked to explain himself. They had not been to bed since, and Clarice was not even close to backing down from the fight.

Frederick Chilton, Hannibal explained, was an incompetent, glory hungry, tasteless, garbage pile of a human being. He reminded her of when she first came to visit him in the mental hospital and Chilton had made a humiliating pass at her. Clarice had forgotten that even happened, clumsy fumbling passes by middle-aged men were so omnipresent in her life that they rarely reached long-term memory storage. Hannibal found that depressing.

"Wait, you weren't even there when he hit on me. How do you remember that?" Clarice asked.

"I know Chilton. I know you. It had to have happened."

Chilton, still bound and gagged in the corner, resented the fact that he couldn't defend himself from this slander. His pride was stung.

"The fact remains, you have been starving and torturing a man in the basement of OUR HOUSE, and you didn't TELL ME."

"You cannot be surprised by that." Hannibal said. "You knew exactly who I was when you agreed to travel with me."

"Yes, but…" Clarice wasn't sure how to continue. The last few weeks had been amazing. Already her life at the Bureau, at the farm, it all seemed like a weird, uncomfortable dream compared to her vivid, delectable present. Hannibal was an excellent conversationalist, he doted upon her, and slipping out of the bonds of her constricting morality had felt almost rapturously freeing. But there, to her left, was Frederick Chilton. Without his replacement jaw half his face was sunken; his pale chest rose and fell too quickly, a sign of panic. It went against every fiber in her being not to let him free. "he's so pathetic."

"He has always been pathetic." Hannibal sneered. Clarice bit her cheek. Three months of constant companionship had peeled away some of Hannibal's carefully maintained layers of self-preservation. He was bitter about having been imprisoned by someone he felt to be intellectually inferior, and he was going to murder and eat him.

Eating Paul had felt triumphant. Again, she met Frederick's eyes for a moment as they darted back and forth between Hannibal and herself. Would this feel the same?

"Give me a few days to adjust." She said. "this is all new for me, you know."

A few tears started to leak from the sides of Chilton's eyes, rolling down his temples and into his ears.

"Of course, my darling." Hannibal stroked the side of Clarice's perfect, marble white face. "Of course." He kissed her nose. Clarice felt the first stirrings of unease that she had felt in a very long time.


	3. Chapter 3

Will had a short list of places he had considered Hannibal might use as a hideout. It was based mostly off of conversations they had shared, books that he flipped though in Hannibal's office, and sketches Hannibal had made while he was a free man.

However, after briefly looking into locales such as Bordeaux, Rome, Berlin, Mykonos, Istanbul, and Nizhny Novgorod, he realized that while visiting all these places would make for a pretty classy passport, randomly searching these cities would not get him particularly far.

His best course of action would be to contact Hannibal directly. This would obviously be difficult, but considering the fact Hannibal always seemed to be able to find him, he figured it was worth a shot. Even with Hannibal on the run he still sent Will a birthday card every year, untraceable, full of beautiful calligraphy.

* * *

As a wise man once said, serial killers are narcissists, they love to read about themselves. Hannibal was more than a narcissist, he would consider that an oversimplification of his specific mental state, but he could not resist keeping an eye on what the public wrote about him. And while psychiatric journals only published quarterly, tattle crime published something like 40 poorly edited garbles of sensationalist news a day, frequently on the subject of Hannibal the Cannibal. Will was going to have to pay a visit to Freddie Lounds.

If Freddie Lounds' bank would let her withdraw enough cash to make a throne out of it, she would write all of her blogs from that seat. Since they hadn't let her do that yet, she settled for writing from an obnoxiously expensive treadmill desk, which she decorated with pink reflective bumper stickers. She walked briskly forward, going nowhere, tapping out a story about an unsolved crime from 1989. The little girl who had been abducted was very cute and white so she was sure her readership would be suitably enraged.

"Ms. Lounds." A soft male voice greeted her from her doorway. Recognizing the voice immediately, Freddie allowed herself to be carried off the end of the treadmill and with a graceful little jump off she greeted her caller.

"Mr. Graham." She said, tilting her head slightly like a velociraptor. "Not in prison yet!"

Will was wearing a pretty ragged looking suit and his hair was even more disheveled than usual. His face, which had always seemed unattractively boyish to her, had grown more browned and wrinkled. The dark circles below his eyes were pronounced. His hands were twitchy.

"I am not yet in prison. Good of you to notice." Will said, doing that flinching thing that he always did when he spoke to people he disliked.

"Neither is your friend." Lounds pointed out.

Will made a face. "Hannibal Lecter is not my friend. Or my husband, as you so charmingly insinuated."

"Mm." Freddie pursed her lips.

Hannibal the Cannibal (registered trademark) had been a real cash cow for tattle crime. Not only was he a fancy European man who ate people, a favorite of American tabloid readers for decades, Freddie had known him personally, which gave her stories that truthful edge you just couldn't find anywhere else. She had posted so many pictures of Hannibal's striking cheekbones that she had grown to resent them. Hannibal's glory days had passed though. A blog post about a Hannibal sighting used to rake in millions of views, now it was only the hardcore followers that clicked, and even fewer that shared.

Murder Husbands had been a stroke of genius. She had paid for her hybrid car from that headline alone.

"I need a favor." Will Graham said.

"I don't know, Will, whenever I do that someone always seems to end up on fire in a wheelchair in a parking garage."

"I have a letter I would like you to post on your website. In your anonymous guest contributions section." Will handed Freddie a printed sheet with a brief paragraph typed on it. She scanned it, then raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow.

"This reads like a letter someone might write to, I don't know, their husband?"

"Will you or won't you do it?" Will sighed.

"Oh I'll run it." Freddie hopped back up on to her treadmill, thoughtfully beeping the buttons to raise the speed. "If he writes back that's two million hits, easy."

* * *

Hannibal Lecter stared at his computer screen, running his thumb back and forth across his jaw.

The message, framed by blinking ads for home safety devices and miracle cancer cures, was written in a bright neon yellow against a black backdrop, classic Tattlecrime aesthetic. It read as follows:

"Achilles. It's Patroclus. It seems our allies are all dead now, aren't they? Although you seem to have found yourself a Helen. I am hoping not. We are exactly alike, you and I. Write me back."

His jaw clenched. He heard the door open behind him and resisted an urge to slam the computer shut as Clarice trotted into the room.

"Anything good today?" Clarice wrapped her arms around his neck and looked at the computer screen over his shoulder. Hannibal felt a twinge of irritation, which he swallowed.

"It's Will Graham." He said.

"No way!" Clarice skimmed the note. "Well that's… " She paused, brow furrowed. "Weren't Achilles and Patroclus lovers?"

"Achilles and Patroclus embodied the Homeric ideal of heroic masculine friendship, and that friendship did not exclude sexual feeling." Hannibal explained coolly.

Clarice tried to keep her expression neutral, but even years of FBI training couldn't keep her eyebrows from raising slightly.

"So uh… you and Will Graham, got along pretty well, did ya?"

"He's clumsily playing to my ego by making me Achilles. I'm disappointed."

"Hm." Clarice was, of course, familiar with Will Graham and the way that he apprehended Hannibal Lecter. There were some gaps in the record though, she had suspected that there had been an FBI cover up of some kind of entrapment effort. Jack would never talk about it, back when she worked with him, all she knew was that it ended with the death of a teenage girl and near fatal injuries for Jack Crawford, Alana Bloom, and Will Graham. But if this was some kind of… honeypot scheme, like what so many people thought she was doing when she worked with Hannibal… well. That would be uh, that would be something else.

"So were you and Will Graham, um… involved? Romantically?" She asked.

Hannibal smiled. Clarice had a kind of natural refinement when it came to talking about this kind of thing. It was one of the many traits that drew him to her.

"Did we fuck, do you mean?" Hannibal, when he wasn't wearing his person suit, was a tad more direct.

"Well did you?"

Hannibal paused, choosing his words carefully. "Will Graham was my friend. Much like you and I are friends."

"So you had sex with Will Graham?" Clarice spoke calmly, resisting a ridiculous immature desire to giggle.

"Would that make you jealous?" Hannibal asked, with an infuriating little wicked smile.

"Are you 16 years old?"

"No, are you?"

Both of them stared at each other with an immature refusal to back down. They were at a stalemate when a buzzer on Hannibal's phone informed both of them that it was time to give their prisoner downstairs his evening meal. Clarice's head twitched slightly and a line of tension appeared in her forehead, quickly masked.

"Excuse me." Hannibal said, softly, and left the room. Clarice slipped into his chair and read Will Graham's message again. "Patrochlus, huh?" She whispered to herself.

Hannibal decided that he would write back to Will Graham as he pressed the button on the blender, shrilly combining the greens and fruits for Chilton's evening smoothie. All he needed to do was decide how.

* * *

Ardelia Mapp, in a very polite response to Will Graham's text, explained to him that he could not visit the apartment she had shared with Clarice Starling because after her roommate had disappeared she couldn't afford the rent. She was, however, happy to show him most of Clarice's stuff, which she had dumped into a giant black trash bag for the most part and stuffed into a closet in her new, cheaper, apartment.

"Here it is." Ardelia lugged the bag out into the center of her out beige carpeted living room. Her hair hung down in braids and she wore a pastel sweater with cut off high waisted shorts. She was a light skinned black woman in her early 30s, very fit, with deep circles under her eyes. She looked at Graham and let out a resigned sigh. "Have at it."

Will nodded awkwardly. There were probably 800 things that a trained FBI agent should probably say to this woman whose friend had gone missing months ago. Instead of saying any of them, he mentally panicked, made an awkward grunting noise, and silently began to dig through the bag, palms sweating.

Starling's clothes were simple, comfortable, mostly from affordable chain stores like Target or Old Navy. There was a Disney pillow with a cartoon Goofy on the front that fell out of the back as he shuffled through. It seemed childish to him.

"I bought that for her at Disneyland." Ardelia said from the other side of the room. She had been leaning on the couch, biting her thumbnail, watching Will work. "We went after graduating from the Academy. She got sick on a ride and I bought that for her so she could lie down on a bench."

"I'm not a big roller coaster person either." Will admitted, setting the pillow down carefully. He sighed. Nothing in the bag was telling him anything about Clarice he didn't already know. Ardelia was slowly and systematically peeling the label off of her coke bottle, avoiding eye contact with him.

"Where do you think she went?" Will asked. In the file had referenced in preparation for this visit some other agent had written one word next to Ardelia's picture: "Uncooperative."

Ardelia abruptly put her coke down on the coffee table and glanced at Will through narrow eyes.

"I don't know where she went." She said.

"Oh of course not, I totally… I understand. Got a guess though?"

Ardelia started biting her thumbnail again, avoiding eye contact. Her shoulders were hunched and she was tapping her foot anxiously.

"She's probably with Hannibal, wherever the hell that is."

"Why do think so?"

Ardelia groaned and then stepped over to her cupboard, yanking open her top drawer. Underneath a pile of socks she pulled out a plastic Ziploc bag, in which there was a little paper note. She tossed it at Will.

"I never sent it to the FBI, I was just so pissed."

Will smoothed out the plastic so he could read the note. The handwriting was the same loopy schoolteacher's style as he had seen in Clarice's workspace.

"I'm fine, and better than fine?" He read aloud.

Ardelia tapped her foot in irritation, toying with a ring she was wearing on her right hand.

"She's fucking that cannibal murderer psychopath." She said, her voice cracking. It was the fact that had simmering at the back of her mind for months, an unspoken secret of such voluminous stupidity that she couldn't bring herself to share it with anyone, her mother, her therapist, anyone. "This is our friendship ring." She held up her hand revealing a simple, tasteful ring. "She sent me our friendship ring, with that fucking note, and says don't worry? Don't look for her? What the fuck is wrong with her?"

Will nodded in what he hoped was an understanding fashion, although he couldn't hide a slight flush that was rising in his face. He was going to have to pretend that the thought of sleeping with Hannibal Lecter was totally outlandish, and not, you know, something that occurred to him on a frequent, if not nightly basis.

"You think she chose to go with him?" He asked.

"He got in her head. He's been in her head since Buffalo Bill, and he made a nice little house there, and Clarice welcomed him in with some southern hospitality. And YOU assholes, the FBI, you all didn't help! The FBI broke Clarice Starling into a million tiny little pieces, and that just made it easier for Hannibal pick them up and put them back together however he wanted."

"I'm not FBI."

"Well good for you." Ardelia snapped. She sat down on her IKEA futon with a hard thud. "I'm sorry." She said, voice wavering a little bit. "it's just…" For the first time in a while tears began to well up in the corners of Ardelia's eyes. "He's going to kill her. And she can't see it, and she's too smart for this."

Will was still kneeling on the floor next to a large black garbage bag. As Ardelia fought to not cry, he toyed with the Goofy pillow. In an apotheosis of bad timing, his phone went off, playing the obnoxious generic ringtone he had never got around to changing.

"I'm so sorry…" He scrambled to get up. He didn't recognize the number, and resolved that if it was somebody telling him he had won a cruise or some shit he would smash it with a hammer. As he stepped outside Mapp's apartment he answered the phone.

"Will Graham speaking." He said.

"Hello Will." An immediately recognizable deep and accented voice on the other line replied. Will froze. "Or are you going by Patrochlus now? It was good to hear from you."

Will's mouth dried up. He had checked Tattlecrime every day for a response to his post, he had even written drafts of possible responses on his home computer. Even so, words were failing him.

"Hello Hannibal." He managed.

"You sound well."

"I don't feel all that well, frankly." Will sighed.

"Come find me. Helen would like to meet you."

"I'm…" before Will could answer the other line went dead. Will was left standing on a concrete landing outside Ardelia's apartment, staring at the screen of his phone. Astonishingly, his caller ID showed a number. Country code +53. Hannibal was in Cuba.

When he turned around he saw Ardelia leaning against her doorframe, face dour.

"He called you?" She asked. "With Clarice it was usually letters. Good handwriting for a psychopath."

"Yeah." Will agreed, awkwardly. When Ardelia failed to respond, he continued, "He offered to do the calligraphy for my wedding invites from prison."

"You take him up on it?"

"I considered it in bad taste."

"Mmm." Ardelia's expression was stone. "So you're one of his favorites too?"

"Well, I mean…" Will stumbled for words.

"He's in your head. Watch out for yourself." With a resigned sigh, Ardelia Mapp slammed her door.

Will didn't hesitate, he took off immediately at almost a run. He just barely avoided falling down her stairs as he used his phone to look up plane tickets to Cuba. To his luck, there was a flight leaving Reagan airport in four hours.

* * *

"I mean, he's helped out my French pronunciation like, a TON. And there's just something about him, you know? Like, an intensity. I don't know. He looks right into your soul."

Clarice was pacing back and forth across the unfinished floor of her cuban guesthouse, speaking to the still bound and gagged Frederick Chilton. He was the only person with whom she could speak frankly, and there was of course the added perk of him not being able to respond. It really helped to clear the mind. He was a great listener.

Frederick Chilton, for his part, did not enjoy these chats. Never a man who was above wallowing in self-pity, he had spent the majority of the past several weeks, once his initial panicked adrenaline had run out and left him exhausted and miserable, ruminating on just how thoroughly Hannibal Lecter had fucked up his life. No, it hadn't been enough for Doctor Lecter to allow his organs to be removed one by one, he also had to have him falsely imprisoned and shot in the face. Sure, back when Lecter had been in Chilton's care he had bent the rules a few times, for revenge purposes, but, I mean, really. Shot in the face. And then set on fire, that had been Will's fault. And now to be snatched out of paradise and murdered gruesomely by a former FBI agent, it was just impossible. It was too much. If he didn't get some kind of payout in the afterlife, well, God owed him one.

Clarice was still talking, much to Chilton's exasperation.

"I guess I never really saw him as like, a bad guy. He helped me catch Buffalo Bill, and he was so thoughtful. And the fact that he was dangerous… well, there's an attraction in that, you know?"

Frederick Chilton did know. It was the whole, "dangerous guy who loves only me" bullshit that had gifted humanity with the Twilight franchise. But there was another side to that dangerous guy, it was the side that he showed to literally everybody else that he didn't love. To continue with the Twilight analogy, if Clarice was Bella, he was that one deer that Edward killed.

"But." Clarice looked at Chilton again. His face was gaunt and pale, and he smelled rank. His eyes stared directly into hers, and as weak and watery as they were, they expressed a real terror. She could not look at him and feel anything but pity.

"Clarice?" Hannibal beckoned from the top of the stairs. Chilton's whole body twitched in fear. "Are you coming to dinner?"

"Yes, love." Clarice responded, eyes still fixed on Chilton. Quickly, she leaned down and whispered in a focused, clear voice, so close to his ear holes that only he could hear it, "I'm going to get you out of here."

Chilton's eyes met hers again, and Clarice gave him an affirmative nod before turning to leave.

She could see Hannibal holding open the door at the top of the stairs. He was wearing a tight fitting striped grey button down shirt and black slacks, covered by a linen apron. He looked like a model in a Williams-Sonoma catalog. He watched Clarice's every step as she ascended towards him.

"What do you do down there?" He asked, gently.

"Just trying to get some things straight." She said, brushing some of his hair out his eyes. Hannibal gave her a tight-lipped smile and kissed her cheek.

"Perhaps, like King Herod, I ought to keep my Salome away from our imprisoned St. John."

Clarice squinted at him.

"I'm not familiar with that reference."

"It's from the bible, so of course it has multiple iterations and interpretations. Salome falls in love with St. John and requests her stepfather sets him free. When St. John rejects her, she requests his head on a platter. Like most saints, he ends up coming to a grisly end."

"That's a pretty weak analogy there, Hannibal, not one of your best."

"Did you know…" Hannibal smiled and continued in a friendly fashion as he poured her a glass of wine, "In a Greek poetic retelling of the story, Salome's head ends up on a platter, as well as St. John's? She offers it to gain the love of a young philosopher."

A chill ran down Clarice's spine as she took the glass from his hand. She smiled coldly. "You can tell that version was written by a man." She said.

Hannibal smiled back, and for the first time in a long time she saw something other than openness in his expression. Back when she was in the FBI, trying to seek Hannibal out, one of the reports which she had read had said that Hannibal had "devil eyes." At the time Clarice thought that was pretty sensationalistic and untrue. Hannibal had intense eyes, certainly, but there was nothing demonic about them. Freddie Lounds had photoshopped Hannibal's eyes to be blood red so frequently that a large portion of the population thought that he actually had red eyes. Clarice had never before understood where that impression had come from. Ever since their first rather disgusting and tense meeting Hannibal had been a friend and a mentor, not a monster. But for a second, as she sipped her wine and he sipped his, she saw that murderous empty glint that for so many others must have been their last vision on this planet.

"Bon Appetit." He said, and Clarice's skin crawled.


	4. Chapter 4

Will Graham had not packed well for Cuba. As he sat in the Plaza de armas, sipping a café cubano, he was sweating uncomfortably through a dark gray sweatervest. His Spanish was rusty, and he'd been getting by mostly on service industry pity. His coffee was the result of walking up to the counter of a busy café, glancing with blank terrified eyes from the wall menu to the cashier, and saying nothing. The cashier had rolled her eyes, shouted "CUBANO" to the barristas, and demanded some pesos, which Will handed over with relief.

He was sitting in an historic open air plaza with a large secondhand book market. A lot of the books on in the rows and rows of shelves were U.S. dime novel schlock, Anne Tyler and Tom Clancy novels which Hannibal wouldn't touch. That aside, a scenic and historic book market was as good a Hannibal draw as Will could imagine, and he had staked an outdoor seat at a café which had a view of most of the square. It was crowded with tourists, but Will flattered himself that he could pick Dr. Lecter out in a crowd, even if he was wearing some kind of disguise.

Clarice ran her hand down the spine of a yellowed paperback copy of The Valley of the Dolls, not really paying attention to what it was as she pulled it off the shelf. She had frequented the Plaza de Armas book market probably more than was safe for someone on the run from the law. Pretty soon some of the book dealers were going to begin to recognize her. But she couldn't stand to be in the house today and after a couple hours of wandering this was where she wound up. A Danielle Steele novel caught her eye and she reached for it, then paused when she thought of Hannibal's face when he saw her reading a book with a photoshopped shirtless farmhand on the cover. She gritted her teeth and picked up the book anyway. She was a grown woman and could read whatever she wanted, and he was a serial killer who could shut the fuck up about it.

Clarice noticed, as she continued to peruse the aisles, a tourist sitting on the other side of the plaza who seemed familiar. He was dressed like somebody who didn't understand cuban weather, and he had a noticeable brown mop of curly hair. She pretended that she wanted to look at a book on a lower shelf, and slowly knelt behind her book cart. Through the shelves she got a closer look at the oddly bundled up man in sunglasses. He didn't exactly blend in, and a closer examination sent Clarice's mind whirring. It was Will Graham. He had finally tracked them down. A month ago Clarice would have been off to Hannibal to try to figure out the best way to escape. Now she stayed where she was, tapping her heel nervously.

"Puedo ayudarte?" a dark skinned Cuban man asked politely, leaning over the book cart and smiling.

"No, no gracias." Clarice said in her terrible Spanish accent, pulling herself up from her kneeling position and tugging her skirt down from where it had bunched up. Her head swam from standing up too quickly, and she felt herself sway for a moment. She grabbed one of the shelves in front of her to steady herself, taking a few deep breaths. If she ignored Will he would have more of an opportunity to find her and Hannibal and take them out. If she told Hannibal about it he would dispatch of Will immediately and she would be stuck here, in Cuba, while below her feet a pathetic man slowly died. She lay her book down, adjusted her sunglasses, and started to walk across the square directly towards Will Graham's table. She was about halfway there when she saw him sit up in recognition, gripping the arms of his chair in surprise. She smiled, keeping an eye on his hands to make sure he didn't reach for anything.

"Hello Mr. Graham." She greeted him with a firm voice once she reached his table. "May I join you?"

"Um, sure." Will said, mind racing.

Clarice sat down. Will had seen her many times on television during her FBI trials, but he was surprised at how small she was in person, even shorter than him he would guess. Very pale and attractive, her reddish hair was pulled back into a messy bun and she looked like any nice white lady on vacation. She was wearing a dark green loose fitting blouse and a tight gray skirt which Will was willing to bet Hannibal bought for her.

"I don't think we've met before, I'm Clarice Starling." Clarice said, keeping her voice low so nobody would overhear.

"Oh, I'm aware." Will said.

"And you're here looking for our mutual friend." She said.

"Maybe I'm just on vacation?"

"Don't patronize me." Clarice said, adjusting her sunglasses again. "I might be able to help you."

"Help me do what?" Will asked.

Clarice's expression hardened for a moment.

"That depends on what you're here to do."

"Well… I'm not 100% sure what I'm here to do myself." Will said, laughing a little at himself. Feasibly he was still here to arrest Hannibal Lecter and rescue Clarice Starling, but for the most part he was just looking forward to sitting and having a real conversation with his former psychiatrist.

"Well, if you're here to kill me, you're just plumb out of luck. But if you're here on behalf of the FBI to bring Hannibal Lecter to justice, I might be able to help you out." Clarice said.

"Your friend Ardelia says Hannibal has you right under his thumb." Will said. "So, forgive me for not completely trusting you."

"You talked to Ardelia?!" Clarice felt a deep cold tug of homesickness. She shook her head to focus again on the subject at hand. "Hannibal told me he had you right under his thumb." She replied. "And he's usually right about these things. But don't worry, we're in a kind of situation where trusting anybody would be pretty stupid, right?"

"You are not wrong." Will admitted, and they sort of nodded at each other.

Clarice tapped the table's edge thoughtfully.

"Tell me about your relationship with Hannibal." She asked.

"Uh…" Will felt himself flush. "He framed me for multiple murders."

"Yeah, I thought that was pretty wild when I read about it. You must have been pissed."

"I was furious. But you know, we were… I'm not… anyway. We were friends." Will looked profoundly uncomfortable. Clarice could understand how he felt.

"He was your Achilles?" Clarice asked, gently.

Will paused. "I was his Patroclus, I think."

They both sat in silence for a moment, letting the bustling street noise of the market fill in the uncomfortable silence. Clarice's mind was whirring.

"I think the best thing for you to do would be to pretend that you're still in love with him." She said, bluntly. "He's not an idiot but he is easily flattered, and I can tell he really liked you." Clarice gave a half smile. "You were one of his favorites."

"Oh!" Will flushed a little, "yeah, um, I'll sure uh, pretend to… yup."

"He and I have been fighting a little bit, so it will really appeal to him to have you turn up out of the blue. He'll think you're here to kill him, of course, but he'll probably try to seduce you before that."

"Seduce?!" Will's eyes widened.

"Don't play dumb, you've done this before right? When he stabbed you in the stomach? I've had to play the honeypot too, it's nice to have a man do it for once."

Will had already been sweating because of his sweater, but he was stress sweating pretty badly now. This was not how he had intended for this afternoon to go.

Clarice leaned forward and spoke softly and directly to Will. "He'll be at the Museo Nacional de bellas artes tonight. They're having a lecture. Meet him when it finished. Ok?" She stared right into his eyes.

"Ok." Will said. Clarice smiled and laughed like they were acquaintances who had just run into each other and had a nice, casual chat. She gathered up her bag, waved, and left Will at his table. His heart pounded.

* * *

Hannibal was disappointed in the lecture. He had been interested in Yoan Capote's work ever since he had seen his sculpture of cinder blocks held up by the legs of a human skeleton. But, just had he had feared, in person Capote's work lacked the real viscera of someone of Hannibal's taste. The teeth holding up the walls of one of Capote's works were simply symbolic. He didn't go far enough to really be interesting.

Also, there had been a very loud and very giggly group of undergraduate art students who seemed to only be attending the lecture for credit. One particular young man, who was wearing, with stunning boldness, a half-finished knit hat which still had the double edged needles crowning the top of his head, continuously kicked the back of Hannibal's chair while making snide remarks to his friends. Later, he obliviously kicked over a colleagues glass of wine, absently placed next to the leg of one of the gallery's chairs, seeping red liquid into Hannibal's socks and recently purchased leather shoes. The young man didn't even notice when he left to walk home that night that there was a tall dark figure following him from a few yards back.

Will had recognized Hannibal as soon as he had stepped out of the museum, even though he was wearing he lapels of his jacket up to hide his face. He was as broad shouldered and strangely handsome as ever, and his expression was hard. His focus was fixed on a group of undergraduates walking in a pack. Hannibal, on the outside, was like a cheetah scoping out a pack of gazelles. For a moment Will wasn't sure if he was going to have to shout to get his former psychiatrist's attention, but just as Hannibal was about to follow the group down the street his glance shifted over to Will's, and he froze.

Will inhaled abruptly. He had forgotten how intense Hannibal's gaze could be. But after a few seconds the corners of Hannibal's mouth turned up into a smile.

"Hello Dr. Lecter." Will said.

"Will. My old friend." Hannibal put his hands in his pockets and stood smiling at Will. He was close enough that if Will pulled out a gun or something he could rush him and take him out before anyone would notice. But Will's posture didn't suggest any incoming attack. Hannibal's smile widened. "I'm happy you found me."

"You basically led me here." Will said. "My deduction skills aren't all that impressive."

"You found the gallery though, that's interesting." Hannibal said. "Are my habits that easy to predict?"

"You've been betrayed." Will said. "And not by me, this time."

"Hm." Hannibal said, keeping his hands in his pockets and not looking particularly perturbed. "I thought so. We'll have to do something about that."

"Want to, uh… get dinner first?" Will suggested.

Hannibal met Will's eyes and smiled. "I would be delighted."

They ended up sitting on a street corner, eating papas rellenas they had bought from a street vendor. The sun had long since set, but the city was lighting up, and taxis and passersby bustled along on their way to whatever Havana nightlife held in store. The narrow streets were framed by brightly colored historic structures, which brought the streets of Florence to Will's mind.

"I've got to say, it's nicer without rooftop snipers." Will said, taking a large bite of one of his deep fried potato delicacies.

"Good, I was going to ask if those were incoming." Hannibal said with a smile.

"Well good." Will replied, taking in Hannibal's unusual features and quick, confident movements. "I've missed your letters." He blurted out.

"You hated my letters."

"Well obviously, but I also miss them."

Hannibal glanced at Will mischievously. "Clarice never hated my letters. She kept them. They got her kicked out of the FBI."

"Well, Clarice just betrayed you to who she thought was the FBI, so, I think I still come through on top here."

Hannibal sighed and stared off thoughtfully. She'd been flinching away from him for weeks; he'd been trying to determine when she would have to be dealt with. "Clarice doesn't think the way that I think." Hannibal said, putting down his empty basket of street food. "I thought she might, for a while, but I was mistaken."

"Mm." Will said. "You used to say that I was the only person who could think like you."

"Well," Hannibal said, meeting Will's gaze directly. "Can you?"

* * *

Clarice had curled up on her bed reading her new bad romance novel from the late afternoon until she had needed to turn a lamp on to be able to make out the words. Hannibal still wasn't home. She fixed herself a sandwich for dinner, cutting her own slices of the fresh bakery bread Hannibal preferred and cursing him for never buying pre-sliced. Sure, the bread was better quality then pre-sliced, but you've got to clean up all those goddamn crumbs when all you want is a sandwich.

The hour grew later, Clarice watched the hands of the clock tick past the time Hannibal's lecture ought to have ended, and then some. She dug through her purse for her phone, and dialed a number from memory, even though it had been a long while since she'd used it.

"Hello?" Ardelia's immediately recognizable voice answered.

Clarice grinned. Ardelia never answered the phone from unrecognized calls. Serendipity was on her side today.

"Hi Ardelia, it's me. It's Clarice."

There was silence for a moment on the other line. Clarice's confidence started to drain out. If she could see Ardelia's face, to read her reaction, she might know what to say.

"The fuck is wrong with you?" Ardelia snapped.

Ah, there she was. Clarice knew how to handle this.

"So I've been thinking." She rolled back into her old southern cadence that was so comfortable with another southern girl. "And I can see what this whole thing might look like from your side, and I agree I do not come out looking too great."

"Looking too great? You killed Krendler."

"You know I was under the influence of a lot of drugs, and I feel real bad about that." Clarice said. She didn't really though, she couldn't feel bad about Krendler.

"And now you've called me so I'm some kind of accomplice."

"Oh no, Ardelia, I'm sorry, I fucked up. I need your help though. You can arrest me and everything and I understand, but I need your help right now."

"Are you all right?" There was a little break in Ardelia's voice, and for the first time Clarice thought about what her friend might have gone through after her disappearance. Her heart felt very tight in her chest.

"Oh I'm all right, I'm just, I think I need to get out of here."

"You fucking THINK!?"

"I met with Will Graham today, and I think together we can…"

"Hold up, Will Graham?"

"Yeah. He said he's trying to catch Hannibal again."

"Don't trust him."

Clarice paused her nervous pacing for a moment, tilting her head.

"You think he's trying to bring me in, too?"

"I think he just wants to be in your shoes Clarice. Hannibal fucked him up worse than he fucked you up."

"He…" Clarice paused for a moment. This whole conversation had reminded of her of a world beyond Hannibal, and the rush of cool reality into her elegant world of exotic rich foods and candlelight and blood was becoming uncomfortable. Ever since she had joined Hannibal in their elegant mutual dinner of her colleagues' brain, hell, ever since she had turned the key in her car to go rescue him from Mason Verger, she had considered herself to be behaving in a slightly impulsive but ultimately reasonable fashion. She had felt completely in control of her life and her decisions. But Ardelia's tone was like getting slapped out of a hysterical fit, or having someone but their freezing fingers on one's neck when you least expect it. "He really fucked me up didn't he?" Clarice whispered.

"Clarice. Will Graham is going to betray you. You have got to get out of wherever you are right now. Call the police."

"Hmmm." Clarice ran through the possible scenarios for how this situation could play out in her head, and there were a very small percentage of them that did not end in her being murdered and eaten. "Ok."

"Hang up right now and call the police. Wait, tell me where you are first, I'll call everybody I can." Ardelia said. "Clarice, babe, you're gonna get out of there."

"Ok. Ok ok ok." Clarice ran her fingers through her hair, and started to weigh her options.

* * *

The tension for Will was unbearable. He and Hannibal had been walking side by side for streets now, sometimes talking, sometimes not, sometimes looking at each other with deep understanding, sometimes just walking. The thing was, he had no idea where they were going, and every time Hannibal's arm brushed past his he felt a thrill of deep emotion that was going to send him to an early grave. He wanted to ask if they were going to a hotel, but every time he opened his mouth to ask he was overcome with a wave of self doubt and would shut up with a flush of shame. Probably they were just going to some alley where Hannibal would kill and eat him, or Clarice was going to jump out from behind some historic brick building and shoot him in the head. Then she and Hannibal would probably and kiss and frolic next to his dead body or something. Typical.

Hannibal placed his hand on Will's low back, and it was like electricity shot through Will's entire nervous system.

"Do you still have that scar on your belly?" Hannibal asked, now very close to Will's side.

"From when… you almost killed me?" Will asked. "I do."

"Hm. I might want to take a look at that later." Hannibal said. "For old times sake." He pulled Will's waist a bit closer.

"Oh Jesus Christ." Will stopped in the street and pulled Hannibal's face down to his, kissing him aggressively right in the middle of Havana. Most of the semi drunk people passing by just moved around them, but several stopped to glare at the display. "I'm not fucking with you Hannibal." Will hissed when he finally pulled back, flushed. Hannibal looked pleasantly surprised, his hair a bit mussed. "This isn't some kind of intricate mind game." Will continued. "I'm here because I want to be with you. You were right about me, I do understand you, and I think you understand me too. I think you're the only one who understands me, I don't even understand me. I need you to explain me to me, or else I'm just going to keep fixing cars and feeling nothing for the rest of my life."

"Will. My friend." Hannibal said, and his eyes were soft. He brushed some of Will's hair out of his face and kissed him again, more gently this time. Will wanted to melt into his embrace but Hannibal pulled back. "There's so much I want to show you."

"Come to my hotel with me." Will finally whispered. "Please."

"No." Hannibal said. "Come with me. We have a few things to take care of, first."


	5. Chapter 5

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is the fifth and final chapter of "A Crossbow String." Thank you for reading this story! I know it came out WAY after the show ended, but I just rewatched the DVDs and read the books and felt compelled to write something. Thanks again, I hope you enjoy!

* * *

It was a cool April evening and the huge neocolonial mansions of the Playa district loomed imperiously over the street where Hannibal and Will were walking. The streets were very poorly lit, and more silent than usual, but Hannibal knew the way back to his house without the help of any signs.

Back when Hannibal "assisted" with the FBI and Will was still in the dark about his real identity, Hannibal had always felt an urge to place a possessive hand on Will's lower back when they walked side by side. He had never mentioned it to Bedelia, the base nature of such an urge was glaringly obvious. It surprised him how quickly that urge returned, and what a strange sort of thrill he felt knowing that Will welcomed the gesture. He gently placed his hand there again, and Will's only response was a smile.

The presence of a black car, that Hannibal didn't recognize, complete with tinted windows, struck him as unusual. He held his hand out in front of Will to stop him walking, and for a moment they both stood silently, Will glancing at Hannibal to try to tell what was going on and Hannibal listening intently. His home was about a block away, around a corner at the end of the street, but there was something wrong. The cool stillness of the night was too much, almost oppressive, and Hannibal could feel a kind of tension in the air. A window from the house near them, illuminated by interior lighting, was darkened when someone rapidly closed the curtains.

"The police are here." Hannibal said. "Come with me."

With unbelievable quickness, Hannibal ducked out of the street and into the shadows. Will rushed to keep up with him, a few yards back.

"Where are you going?" Will hissed, trying to follow Hannibal's steps as he darted through the dark spaces between the closely built homes of this area.

"To the house. I have something to attend to."

"They'll shoot you."

Hannibal crept close to the wall of his neighbor's home, from which he could see the back of his rented house. There were a number of window's looking out to the backyard, many of which still with the original, historic glass. He could make out a dark silhouette in the upstairs window, wavy from the distortions of the glass. It was probably a sniper. Hannibal did some quick mental calculations, and determined he could make it to the back door if he moved fast and kept to the shadows. He looked at Will, already wheezing and out of shape, just now catching up to him.

"Do you have a gun?" Hannibal whispered.

"I, uh, yeah." Will admitted, patting his side where he kept his handgun.

"Good. Stay here, defend yourself if you need to. I'll be back." And with that Hannibal sprinted across his small backyard and crept around the exterior of his home. Will watched, stunned at how quickly Hannibal could move. He'd seen this shift before, but it was always off-putting to see the restrained and courteous doctor transform into this strange, athletic, killer. Will gripped his gun and attempted to keep a lookout. He took some deep breaths. He'd done this before.

* * *

Hector Torres had not been a particularly close follower of the whole "Hannibal the Cannibal" tabloid extravaganza. Some of the the other guys on the force had tracked every story they could find online, devouring the gory details of each confirmed slay by the Chesapeake Ripper, and delighting in the off-putting classiness of the eventual culprit. Most serial killers target the weak and the defenseless, but to target the rude? What a freak show. Torres had always found the tabloid stories to be distasteful. Leave it to America to capitalize even on such a human tragedy as a serial killer. And that his name rhymed with cannibal? It was too macabre.

And yet here he was, standing in a darkened second story room of a house he could never afford, scanning the grounds for Hannibal the Cannibal himself. Nobody had believed the call at first, but after Clarice motherfucking Starling (the pale, frightened face that had been on the homepage of Tattlecrime for years) had shown up at the station herself, the best and brightest of the Cuban police force were brought in. At first Clarice had insisted on herself and Dr. Chilton leaving the country immediately, but their captain had thought of a different plan. Hannibal Lecter was notoriously dangerous, anything out of the ordinary might spook him. It would be better if she would stay at home, awaiting his return from his lecture just like normal. If everything went according to plan, Hannibal would walk in, kiss his lover hello, and be forcibly overtaken by 5 police officers. Clarice had fought against this plan as reckless, but the captain was already awash in his own fantasies of glory. The cuban police force doing what the Americans hadn't been able to do in years. It would be amazing, he would be on the covers of the magazines for once. Eventually she'd given in.

Torres thought, for a moment, that he had seen something move, but in the hazy grey-black darkness of the night it was hard to be sure. He squinted across the periphery of the backyard to make certain, and saw everything was exactly the same. Torres leaned heavily against the window frame, feet beginning to bother him from standing for so long. A neighbor's security camera kept flashing on and off red on the next house over, and twice it had tricked him into thinking something had happened. He tried to keep watch over the whole, pretty sizable backyard. It was a nice part of town, an area where foreign diplomats tended to live, and therefore the police tended to turn a blind eye towards. A nice spot for a killer on the run, really, in retrospect.

Then he heard it. A soft thump sound came from the bedroom. Torres knelt and pointed his gun at the doorway, breathing heavily. His view to the interior of the bedroom was fairly narrow, but he was pretty sure he had heard something from there through the open door. His mouth was dry, and he couldn't decide whether or not to shout. If he was right then everyone would run to help him, but if he was wrong (what if it was just the wind?) he could fuck up the whole operation. He took a step closer to the doorway, trying to think of what to do.

Before he could decide on the best course of action, a large man, moving quickly and with surprising strength, emerged from the bedroom and forced Torres's weapon out of his hands. His arm wrapped tightly around Torres's neck before he had a chance to call out, or register the pain from his broken arm. The last thing that Hector Torres registered seeing before he blacked out from a crushed windpipe was the face from the tabloids, the hellish, strange face of Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal lowered the body to the ground, and wasted no time heading to the stairway. If he had been in charge of casing out this building he would have put two men upstairs, but he found himself alone. As ever, the police force were proving to be helpfully incompetent. He imagined they had ignored Clarice's suggestions. She would be sitting downstairs of course, patiently waiting for him to come home, probably with some scripted greeting planned out for her by some bumbling keystone cop. They would certainly have at least three men in the kitchen.

He removed his shoes, and silently padded his way downstairs, knife in hand. If he played this right he could still take Clarice by surprise. A babyfaced officer with a mustache in too early a phase to be inflicted upon the public met Hannibal at the base of the stairs. His wide, terrified fish eyes remained open as Hannibal ripped his small knife through his neck. Hannibal's suit got a good splashing, and not for the first time he bemoaned the loss of his all plastic murder-suit. It lay somewhere in FBI care probably, which was a shame. It had saved so many of his most expensive ensembles. He kept moving, leaving the young man's body bleeding out in the hallway. As of yet, no one had had a chance to yell, and he still had the opportunity of taking Clarice by surprise.

The two officers in the kitchen put up a bit more of a fight. One was a hefty man, probably in his late forties, undoubtedly the sire of some bratty disgusting children somewhere, and he actually took a few swings at Hannibal after being disarmed. A few well aimed stabs to the neck and lungs left him twitching on the floor of the kitchen with time for Hannibal to throw his knife right between the eyes of the last cop, before he had a chance to raise his gun.

"Que!?" Hannibal heard from the doorway, as one more cuban police officer finally made it to the scene. Three of his colleagues lay on the floor, and well dressed man in blood soaked socks stood right in the middle of the carnage, turning slowly to face him. It was a lot to take in all of a sudden and before he was able to raise his gun Hannibal Lecter had strode calmly across the room and snapped his neck. He hadn't even broken a sweat.

Hannibal stood perfectly still and listened to his surroundings. There was no telltale shuffle of tactical pursuit police shoes on linoleum, no rustling of uniforms. He began to roll up his shirt sleeves, ready to confront Clarice, when he heard the creaking swing of their old wooden front door, left open. She was making her escape.

Hannibal wasted no time running after her, with full focused speed on pursuit. The streets were still dark, but he could see Clarice well ahead of him on the road lumbering a bit. She seemed to be pushing something fairly heavy ahead of her, which was slowing her down.

Hannibal caught up fairly quickly grabbing Clarice by her ponytail and yanking her back towards him.

"Hello, Clarice." He whispered, fully aware of what memories that would dredge up in his victim. He wanted her to remember their first meeting, when she was such a young delicate little thing and he had been the Big Bad Homicidal Maniac. He got a great deal of satisfaction from the terror that met him in Clarice's eyes.

"Not today, fucker." Clarice grunted, and shot her lover in the stomach with a sickening pop.

Hannibal released her, stunned by the sudden attack, stumbling a bit. Clarice wasted no time grabbing the handles of Frederick Chilton's wheelchair and continuing her sprint. She had a helicopter waiting for her by the beach, Ardelia had texted her and said so. Clarice had begged the cuban cops not to set up a sting, but somewhere between the language barrier and the machismo nobody would pay any attention to her. She had pulled Frederick upstairs as soon as she returned to the house from the police station, and once she heard the first sign of a scuffle upstairs she had booked it out the door.

Frederick was heavy, and the wheelchair hadn't been rolled in a long time, one of the smaller wheels kept going wonky, like a rusted grocery store shopping cart, forcing her to frantically propel him forward with brute force until it righted itself, several times nearly knocking the man she was rescuing out of his seat. As she desperately tried to push forward with greater speed, she heard a loud CRACK, and felt the world go still for a moment before the rush of pain to the back of her head sent her tumbling to her knees.

Standing over her, holding a baseball bat he had snatched up from a neighbor's lawn, stood Will Graham, head haloed by a solitary streetlight, breathing heavily. Clarice's eyes were watering with pain, and she whispered, "Please…"

Will looked back at Hannibal, who had pulled himself up and was attempting to staunch the flow of blood from his gunshot wound. He looked down at Clarice, who was lying in a weird shape on the gravel, trying to control her breathing.

For a moment, Will felt a tug of empathy, the kind of all consuming empathy that had allowed him to be such a help to the FBI. There was a kind of flash, and he could all but see his own face standing over him from Clarice's place on the floor. He felt her terror, he felt her frustration, he felt her strange and conflicting emotions for Hannibal, he felt her overwhelming desire for justice which would lead her to rescue a third rate psychiatric hack from the jaws of death. He felt her glowing flame of life, and regretted the crushing futility of such a life whimpering out in the middle of a street in Havana.

Will staggered away from the prone woman, and turned back to Hannibal. He could hear Clarice struggling to her feet behind him and continuing her escape, but soon she was out of earshot and he had Hannibal in his arms and they were staggering together, leaning heavily on one another as they escaped back into the shadows.

"No hospitals…" Hannibal had whispered, his deep, raspy voice breathing into Will's ear, "Take me to your room."

And so Will had taken Hannibal to his crummy little motel room off the highway, carefully removed Hannibal's blood soaked clothes, and fetched him some of the "surgery equipment" Hannibal had requested from a corner store. With astonishing tolerance for pain, Hannibal had cleaned and dressed his own bullet wound, assessing his own condition to be bad, but not life threatening. Once he had stitched himself up to the best of his ability, with Will serving as a kind of play nurse, wiping blood and sanitizing things in boiling water when asked, he sunk back into the motel's yellowish plastic bathtub, exhausted. Will sunk to his knees outside the tub, shaking from fear and exhaustion and stress. They both drifted into sleep, with Will curled up on the bathroom floor like one of his dogs, and Hannibal scrunched uncomfortably in a bathtub, neck awkwardly cradled into the corner, growing more and more sore and uncomfortable as the night progressed.

At about 3 am it was too much, and Will woke up shivering and disoriented. Neither of them had shut the light off, so the shaky fluorescent bulb lent the room a too bright unearthly glow that made his eyes water. Hannibal was still out, and the way that he was twisted awkwardly in the tub made Will's heart leap to his throat. He grabbed Hannibal's shoulder, shaking him gently.

"Hannibal?" He whispered, praying his friend wasn't dead. "Hannibal?!"

"Eh?" Hannibal drifted back into consciousness, blinking in the light, and glancing over at Will. "Oh. Hello Will."

Will sighed in relief.

"Can you stand up? Let's move to the bed. It'll be more comfortable."

Hannibal nodded, and slowly started to move, every inch of his body in aching pain. He managed to pull himself halfway out of the tub before leaning most of his weight on Will and allowing the smaller man to maneuver him to the bed. He let Will tuck him in, like a child, arranging the pillows and pulling up the covers in a motherly way, ignoring the little specks of blood that stained them. By the time Will had shut off all the lights and crawled into the bed Hannibal was comfortable enough to relax into the pillows.

In the pitch darkess, finally comfortable enough to rest, Will couldn't stop thinking about the muscular, half-clothed, injured body lying next to his. The urge to press closer to him was overwhelming, but a fear of possibly worsening Hannibal's injuries held him back. His head pounded, his aching back from lying on the floor seemed to only get worse in his new, much more comfortable location. Every time he shut his eyes he saw the moment Hannibal was shot, the horrible bang, the way Hannibal's whole body had shuddered and then frozen. He jerked slightly, whimpering in his half sleep.

Hannibal rolled to his side, lying face to face with Will. His eyes met Will's and Hannibal reached his hand up to the side of Will's face. Will gently took Hannibal's hand and kissed it, allowing Hannibal to run his hand over his face intimately, tracing the line of his jaw, touching and toying with his ear. Hannibal's hand ran across Will's forehead, still beaded with sweat, and lowered down to his lips, which Hannibal traced delicately, lovingly. When Hannibal's eyes half shut and he began to recoil his hand, Will couldn't take it. He grabbed Hannibal's face and pulled it into his for an aggressive, loving kiss. Hannibal kissed back, pulling Will close into him. Will wanted to melt entirely into him, but he pulled back, breathing heavily.

"Wait, you're too hurt."

Hannibal didn't respond, just pulled Will back into him, kissing him more deeply this time. He'd wanted this for too long to let something stupid like a gunshot wound stop it from happening.

Will had been hard for a while now, and while he had tried to position his body so Hannibal couldn't tell, he gave in when he felt Hannibal's hand slide down his waist, across his hip bones and along the elastic of his boxers. He couldn't help but whimper aloud as Hannibal began to stroke him with one hand, and with the other pull Will's face closer to him, cradling the back of Will's head like something precious. Will pulled himself into Hannibal's embrace, gasping at the overwhelming sensations.

Roughly, Hannibal turned Will around, and Will could feel Hannibal's erection pressing against him, Hannibal's breath hot on the back of his neck. It occurred to Will that they may not have much time together like this before the police or the FBI found them. He felt Hannibal remove his clothes, and forcefully press himself into Will's body. There was pain, considerable pain, but as Hannibal began to move and maneuver inside Will he felt himself lost in the pain and the pleasure and the sheer intensity of being with this man. Finally giving himself entirely over to Hannibal. His whole body started to tremble, and he felt a kind of tingling sensation from deep inside. His penis was red and unbelievably hard, and he pressed himself back into Hannibal as Hannibal thrust into him. Hannibal hardly had to stroke him before he came with a groan of pleasure, gasping and panting for air. Hannibal continued to pull Will close and stroke his hair until they both, exhausted, succumbed once again to sleep.

* * *

Clarice, after multiple meetings with Bedelia De Maurier as an advisor, managed to escape prison on account of having been drugged and mentally manipulated by Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Ardelia Mapp sat in the courtroom as the verdict was read, stunned (but not for the first time) at the multitudinous weaknesses and failures of the American justice system. She couldn't help but cheer on the inside though, because Clarice was safe. She had gone through so much at the end of her time in the FBI, and then to go through whatever the hell Hannibal had put her though… those were the thoughts that had kept Ardelia up at night when Clarice was missing.

She clapped her friend on the shoulder as they exited the courtroom.

"Well, if you're looking for a roommate while you're on parole, you ought to know that I still have a bad habit of leaving dishes in the sink, and I always forget to pay the rent on time." Ardelia said with a grin.

"Well, I have a tendency of leaving for long periods of time with no note or texts, and I can't cook worth a damn." Clarice said.

"Not to mention you've literally eaten a person, I'd put that first on a list of your failings." Ardelia mentioned. "Like, if you were looking for a Craigslist roommate, I think that's something they would want to know."

Clarice narrowed her eyes at her friend and said nothing. Ardelia grinned widely.

"I think we'll get by." Ardelia said, and gave her friend a close hug around the shoulders.

"You think he's…" Clarice bit her lip, and Ardelia's face clouded at how uncharacteristically frightened Clarice seemed. "I mean, I don't think he'll think it's rude to kill me anymore."

"Well, to that I say, congratufuckinglations, you're not the kind of person Hannibal Lecter wants to hang out with." Ardelia said firmly. "And I know all that weird fucker's little tricks now, and if he comes back to try anything on you I'll cut his dick off. Then kill him."

"Well shit." Clarice managed a smile, but despite it all she had to admit it made her feel a little better. She may have betrayed unforgivably one of the most dangerous serial killers in the world, but at least she had friends. And she could start putting her life together, piece by piece.

* * *

Will teared up when he first saw the house which Hannibal had prepared for them. For a moment a life flashed before his eyes, a life if he had never betrayed Hannibal and he had run away with him the first time. He saw himself raising Abigail Hobbs through college, helping her with boy troubles while Hannibal practiced the Harpsichord in the next room. He imagined lavish meals (preferably not human, but you know, whatever) prepared by Hannibal that the three of them would share, routinely and boringly talking through whatever events had taken place in their lives.

But it wasn't to be. It never had been, really.

One day, after a few months after lying low sometimes, traveling other times, eating well, seeing theater and concerts and culture, Will walked into the living room to find Hannibal writing at a large desk with a high quality ball point pen.

Will comfortably ran his hand along Hannibal's shoulders.

"Who are you writing?" He asked.

"It's going to be Clarice's birthday in a few days, I need to pay her my respects."

Only then did Will notice a small manila envelope, bulging strangely, sitting on the edge of Hannibal's desk, beside the fine manuscript paper. Will smiled.

"What's her gift?"

"A woman's ponytail." Hannibal said. "A bit predictable, I know, I considered sending her a moth as a reminiscence of our first meeting but I couldn't find any suitable specimens in this area."

"Mm. Whose ponytail?"

"That woman who ran past us at the coffee shop last week, talking about how vaccines cause autism."

"Oh, nice. Tell Clarice I think of her often."

"I do wish you had had more time to speak, Will. Really, I think you and Clarice would get along."

"Don't even think about it. There's only enough room for two in this serial killer love nest."

"You're sounding like a Freddie Lounds headline."

"I should do an interview with TattleCrime. 'murder husband home life: fun ways to use human body parts to decorate your serial killer love nest.'"

Hannibal gave Will a cold look. Will smiled and stopped teasing him. He walked over to the window and looked at the lovely view of the ocean from their cliffside perch.

"You said that the water keeps eroding away the shoreline, right?" Will asked. "What are we going to do when we can't stay here anymore?"

Hannibal stepped up behind Will and gripped him in a close hug, pulling his small frame closer to his body.

"We'll figure something out." Hannibal said. "Together."

Will leaned back into his lover.

"I feel like going fishing." Will whispered.

"Yes. Let's." Hannibal replied.


End file.
